Accountability Is Elusive in Garment Supply Chain

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

A fashion designer at an office of Mango in Barcelona, where the workplace is in contrast to factories in places like Bangladesh.

PARETS DEL VALLÈS, Spain — From a sleek gray distribution center near Barcelona, the global fashion brand Mango ships 60 million garments in a year. Automated conveyor belts whir through the building like subway lines, sorting and organizing blouses, sweaters and other items to be shipped around the world. Human hands barely touch the clothes.

Five thousand miles away in Bangladesh, the Phantom Tac factory in the industrial suburb of Savar was a hive of human hands. Hundreds of men and women hunched over sewing machines to produce garments in an assembly line system unchanged for years. Speed was also essential, but that just meant people had to work faster.

Last spring, as it pushed forward with global expansion plans, Mango turned to Phantom Tac to produce a sample order of polo shirts and other items. Then, on April 24, the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people in the deadliest disaster in garment industry history, and destroying Phantom Tac and other operations in the building.

Now, eight months later, the question is what responsibility Mango and other brands should bear toward the victims of Rana Plaza, a disaster that exposed the murkiness and lack of accountability in the global supply chain for clothes. Under intense international pressure, four brands agreed last week to help finance a landmark $40 million compensation fund for the victims.

But many other brands, including Mango, have so far refused to contribute to the fund. Mango argues that it is not responsible because it had not "formalized a commercial relationship" with Phantom Tac. Company officials say that Mango was still conducting quality inspections and factory audits of Phantom Tac, and that the factory had not started producing samples for an order of 25,000 items.

But in interviews conducted over several months, supervisors and other employees from Phantom Tac said work to make samples for Mango had already begun when Rana Plaza collapsed. Fabric was being marked and cut, and some workers say some sample shirts were already being stitched.

"There was an urgency among the bosses," said Mohammed Mosharuf Hossain, 28, who worked in a cutting section. "The managers told us to finish the Mango products urgently. They said if we could finish this work quickly, we might get more orders from Mango."

For global brands and retailers, Rana Plaza has forced a reckoning over how to reconcile the mismatched pieces in their supply chains. Technology and investment are transforming the upper end of the industry, enabling Mango and other brands to increase sales, manage global inventories with pinpoint precision and introduce new clothes faster than ever — all as consumers now expect to see new things every time they visit a store.

But these brands depend on factories in developing countries like Bangladesh, where wages are very low and the pressure to work faster and cheaper has spawned familiar problems: unsafe buildings, substandard work conditions and repeated wage and labor violations. Consumers know little about these factories, even as global brands promise that their clothes are made in safe environments.

Phantom Tac could be regarded as an unlikely attempt to prove that a Bangladeshi factory could be socially responsible and make a profit. It was partly owned by a Spaniard, David Mayor, who had won orders from several Spanish brands. He had teamed up with a Vatican missionary in rural Bangladesh to offer a training program for female workers. And he had experimented with creating a website to allow consumers in the West to connect virtually with the workers sewing their clothes.

But the pressures on Phantom Tac to meet deadlines and make money made those social goals difficult to achieve. Employees said the factory was busy but had suffered setbacks: Inditex, the global clothing giant that owns Zara and Lefties, had canceled orders a year earlier after the factory failed a social compliance audit. And several employees said other problems had arisen after underage workers were discovered working as helpers.

Now, Mr. Mayor has disappeared. He did not respond to email requests for interviews, and his family in Spain declined to reveal his whereabouts. His Bangladeshi business partner, Aminul Islam, is in jail in connection with the collapse.

Factories like Phantom Tac in Bangladesh and the Mango operations in Spain are part of the same supply chains, but might as well be from different worlds.

Jim Yardley reported from Parets Del Vallès, Spain, and Savar, Bangladesh. Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Savar, and Silvia Taulés from Parets Del Vallès.

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